International Economic Studies

 Korea€™s youth unemployment problem has continued to worsen since 2004. According to an E24, J64, an analysis of raw data from Statistics Korea€™s Economically Active Population Survey and Supplementary Results of the Economically Active Population Survey on Youths to confirm whether youth unemployment affects all youths, more youths were delaying graduation or taking leaves of absence due to unemployment. In addition, the degree of hardship experienced was found to differ among youths: the younger and less educated tended to suffer more, and women tended to suffer more than men.   Meanwhile, an analysis of whether the youth unemployment problem had a negative impact on the quality of youth jobs showed that, contrary to speculation, during the period between 2004 and 2011 the quality of jobs improved or at least remained the same in almost every respect, including wage levels, percentage of permanent or above-one-year contract positions, and social insurance subscriptions. According to a time-series analysis of the effect of business size on wages performed to investigate the cause of this phenomenon by applying an estimated wage function, during the period from 2004 to 2011, the wage premium according to business size increased among not only youths but all wage workers.   Such a result contradicts the government€™s previous claim that youth unemployment can be solved by creating €œdecent jobs.€ While it is important to create €œdecent jobs,€ what is also important is to bridge the gap in the quality of jobs. In other words, it is necessary to improve the quality of jobs located in the margins of the job ladder in order to solve the youth unemployment issue, and achieving this requires improvement of the competitiveness and working conditions at small and medium-sized enterprises and middle-standing enterprises. JEL Classification: E24, J64

  One of the main problems of SMEs is how to finance their investments. The role of banks in this regard is crucial, since they can be a type of sources of financing through lending credits directly to SMEs. The key role of the paper thus relies on analyzing the effect of SMEs financing by the Iranian banking system.   The objective of this paper is to determine the influence of loans demanded by the SMEs on finance performance of the various Iranian banks. In addition, it studies the role of other important characters related to lending, bank efficiency, and economic performance in finance to SMEs through the banking system.   It is motivated by the hypothesis that macroeconomic-cyclical indicators and bank-specific variables influence the nonperforming loans in the banking system. This is carried out by an application to a logit model. Our findings indicate that several variables have significant effects on nonperforming loans in the Iranian banking system . Return of asset, equity return, SME loan to total loan ratio, inflation, current asset to current liabilities ratio, total SMEs€™ loans to total liabilities ratio and total SMEs€™ loans to total assets ratio have the pronounced significant impacts on nonperforming loans of the Iranian banking . The coefficient of loans to SMEs is significantly positive, which implies that a loan to SMEs increases nonperforming loans method while raising risks to the banking system. JEL Classification: C35, D22, E51

  This paper examines impact of trade liberalization on industrial growth of India. The research problem is expressed as €œTo what extent does trade liberalization or openness of the economy influence industrial growth of India?€ To identify the impacts of trade liberalization, total time period, 1970-2010, is divided into two sub periods of before trade liberalization i.e. (1970 to 1990) and after trade liberalization i.e. (1991 to 2010). The variables identified in the main objective of the study are tested hypothetically, and quantitative analytical methods are applied to make accurate and reliable conclusions. Graphical presentations and regression analyses are used to assess the degree of relationships among variables concerned. Further to test the structural changes in the country, the Chow test is applied. Findings of the study confirm that there is no evidence that the structural changes in industrial growth rates have been happened during the last four decades due to trade liberalization in India. JEL Classification: F14, F13, F14, L52

The pursuit of sustainable development requires balancing the objectives of FDI, Trade, economic growth and environmental protection. Achieving a balance between these often-conflicting priorities is difficult enough at the national level, where competing interests are at least grounded in a common environmental, social and economic context. At the international level, where different countries have vastly different circumstances and priorities, it is significantly harder. One of the many ways in which this challenge manifests itself in the real world is in the conflict between the desire to promote trade by reducing non-tariff barriers and the desire to protect the environment and health through the use of technical regulations and standards.   As competition becomes more global, people are concerned that relatively lenient environmental regulation and lax enforcement in developing countries give them a comparative advantage in pollution intensive goods. Lowering trade barrier may encourage a relocation of polluting industries from countries with strict environmental policy to those with lenient policy. These shifts may increase global pollution, as countries become reluctant to tighten environmental regulations due of their concerns over comparative advantage in international trade. Therefore, trade and FDI may encourage a relocation of polluting industries from countries with strict environmental policy to those with less stringent policy. We call this a pollution haven effect. The pattern of trade depends on which of these effects is stronger. The aim of this paper is to test the validation of the hypothesis of the pollution haven effect on water created by the different industries in the selected countries of Europe and Asia.   Overall, our results show that trade liberalization decreases the BOD emission crated by chemical, food, metal, paper and pulp, textile, wood and other industries but it increases this emission crated by clay and glass industry in the selected EU-Asian countries. JEL Classification : Q51, Q56.

 The oil price shocks are an important source that affect on TOT in both oil exporting and importing countries. Hence, this paper compares the effects of real oil price shock on TOT in both oil importing and exporting countries, using Panel Data technique and during 1980-2010. To the best of our knowledge, we applied the nonlinear approach in order to assess the asymmetric impact of the oil price shocks on TOT. The results show that the oil price shocks influenced the TOT in the oil exporting and importing countries, differently. So that, in oil exporting countries, positive (negative) oil price shocks have significantly positive (negative) effect on their TOT, while in oil importing countries, positive (negative) oil price shocks have significantly a negative (positive) effect on TOT. Furthermore, the findings reveal that in the oil exporting countries, the effect of negative oil price shocks on TOT is more than positive oil price shocks. While, in oil importing countries, it is converse.JEL Classification: E64, F41

 Given that improvement in efficiency is a major resource to economic development, this can be applied to each domestic sector of an economy. The objective of this paper is to measure technical efficiency of the Iranian Post Company across the country€™s provinces using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The ranking of technical efficiency has been calculated by using collected data on post offices across 32 Iranian provinces in 2011 based on assumption of constant return to scale imposed.   The study has specified two models of DEA to explore efficiency of post offices for all Iranian provinces. The first model has shown that provinces of Alborz, Semnan, Mazandaran, Isfahan, Tehran and Bushehr are technically efficient, while the second model has clarified the efficient units, which have been located in the 13th, 14th and 19th zones of Tehran province and the 16th zone of Bushehr province.  JEL Classification: C14, L87